


281. sand castles

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [155]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 18:45:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8726050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: When Helena goes to sleep, she is thirty-two years old.
When she wakes up, she's eight.





	

Sarah’s always been terrible at quiz shows. S used to like watching them sometimes on their old, shitty television set – back in England – and she’d yell the answers and Sarah would curl into a ball on the couch, as small as she could make herself, and not answer.

This is a tangent. This is a long stream of thought; this is Sarah putting as many words as possible in front of what is actually happening, because she doesn’t want to think it, because it’s ridiculous and terrible and very very sad.

HOST: Your clone and sister and mirror twin has somehow woken up this morning a child, and you don’t know how much she remembers, or if she’s ever going to turn back. What do you do?

SARAH: Take her to the beach?

AUDIENCE: [erupts into laughter]

Behind the dark of her closed eyelids the laughter goes on and on – that laugh track, the one that sounds the same on every show you listen to. Sarah would sometimes pick out a single laugh and see if she could find it again, just to prove it’s the same canned roar; she never could duplicate it.

She opens her eyes. There’s Helena, looking very unimpressed by the castle she’s building. She knocks down a tower and then looks at Sarah guiltily, like she’s going to get hit.

“Look at you,” Sarah says. “Godzilla.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Helena tells her seriously. By all rights she should be speaking Ukrainian – when did she even learn English? – but no. It’s English. The accent is maybe stronger, but maybe that’s just because it’s disconcerting hearing that husking voice coming from her own young mouth.

“It means you’re – smashin’ it, yeah?” Sarah says. “Like a dragon, but – different.”

Helena studies her. Her eyes are young and dark and deep; Sarah thinks about drowning before Helena looks away.

“Why am I here.”

_We needed to get you out of the house_ , Sarah thinks.

“Thought you could use a treat,” she says instead, because it’s true.

Helena doesn’t say anything. She’s gone back to reshaping the same tower she knocked down, young hands smoothing the sand with a sort of desperation. “I know you,” she says.

“Yeah?” Sarah says, the word useless.

“Yes,” Helena says. “I think I had a dream about you.” She pauses, worries her lip between her teeth – it’s the most childlike thing Sarah has seen her do so far. Funny, isn’t it, that Helena would be more of an adult like this.

“Oh yeah?” Sarah says carefully. “What sort of dream?”

“You were with me,” Helena says, “and you were real.” She says the last part like it’s important, like Sarah could be unreal and still be with her and it’s important that Helena reassure her that the _un-_ wasn’t there. “You were—” she furrows her brow, sighs. “I don’t know.” She presses her tiny hands to her tiny skull, hard, like she’s going to snap her skull between her hands. Squashed flat.

“Was it a nice dream?”

“Sometimes,” Helena says. She opens her eyes, moves her hands. Sarah had braided her hair earlier with an eerie sort of habit, but now it’s springing loose of its pigtails. It is brown. All of their hair was brown, at this age, before some of them changed.

“I know the dream was true,” Helena says, “because I am not with the nuns anymore, and I am with you, and that means you should be my mother, but you aren’t. And if you aren’t my mother that means you are something else. And in the dream you were something else. So it must have been true.”

“Yeah,” Sarah says, “got it in one. I’m not your mum.”

Helena stares at her again. She must have blinked at some point, but Sarah doesn’t remember it happening. “You’re my family,” she says. “Yes? Not my mother, but – something.”

“I am,” Sarah says. She opens her mouth to make a promise she can’t keep: _I’m going to look after you_ , or _I’m going to fix this_ , or _things are going to be better for you now than they were before_. But before she can Helena turns back to her sandcastle.

“Good,” she says, and knocks the tower down.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [133\. sinner](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9130234) by [piggy09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09)




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